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picked up speed, leaving a bubbling wake as she sailed south, finally quitting the island. With a heavy heart Andreas looked up at the dark outline, his thoughts a mixture of sweet memory and bitter despair. As the ship pulled further away, he could make out the summit and there against the sky stood the profile of the cairn, just as they had left it, with the cross pointing heavenwards as if to chart the old man’s last journey.
Andreas recalled a moment from the previous day, after he had formed the cross, when he had taken a heated chisel from the embers of the fire in the tile-roofed galley and burnt the old man’s name on the intersecting bar. Maybe one day others would remember this saintly old man with whom he had lived for so many years, through bad times and good. Maybe the whole world would come to know of him, the man who now lay buried on that remote windswept summit under the rude wooden cross which in rough Greek letters spelled out his name - NIKOΛAOC – “Nicholas.”
Andreas and his wife, who stood close beside him at the ship’s rail, took one last look back then they turned to face each other searching for some comfort, lost in emptiness and grief; he had been the dearest friend to both of them. In the end inevitably the vessel drove through the sea and around the headland, out of sight of the island and into the bright day. At least, they consoled themselves, they had Nicholas’ written account of his own life in their possession.
THE JOURNEY
* * * * *
Who could have known then what we know now? Getting on for two millennia later, that saintly old man buried atop Partridge Island in 325 AD was to become perhaps one of the best-known figures of all time, his name echoing down the centuries even to this day - to wit our very own Santa Claus. What follows might be his story.
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PART II
A STORY OF MY LIFE
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE BEGINNING
Even in those days long ago when I was young, Patara, the city of my birth, was such a bustling port, but then it was the centre of my boyhood universe. By that time it was already a thousand years old, built, so they said, by ancient Lycians to serve the great cities of the Xanthos Valley whose deep gorges stretched far back into the towering ranges of the Taurus Mountains. The river always ran a translucent jade and icy cold with the melting snows off the high peaks which shut our valley away from the interminable, high plains of Asia Minor.
Natives of the city often boasted that Alexander the Great had spent a few days here as he marched his army around the coast on his way to conquer the mighty Persian Empire some six hundred years ago. Certainly his Greek way of life has left its mark on our city. You only had to look at the magnificent colonnaded streets to see the Greek influence, their cool, pillared shade a real godsend on a hot summer’s afternoon. As a boy I used to run through them on my way to the harbour at the mouth of the river to look at all the ships moored by the quaysides. They came from all round our sea and beyond, those vessels. I found it so romantic, so exciting. I was not to know then that my own journeying was also to take me far from home to places of which I had never dreamt, in search
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of excitement, yes, but as it turned out in search of enlightenment too, a journey which for me brought me to the very meaning of life itself.
When I looked at the sailors I saw such an array of nationalities just from the different styles of clothes they wore – light-skinned fair-haired men from the ports of the Adriatic, from Illyria and Dalmatia, dressed in colourful striped pantaloons and white smocks; dark-eyed Romans from Ostia, looking so austere in their black shirts and trousers; swarthy Arabs with pointed beards from the cities of Phoenicia and from the far-off Nile wearing rough, toe-length gallabiyahs. And there was a real mixture of languages – Latin was the language of the empire and spoken with varying degrees of competence. But Greek was our language and at least in Patara it was the language everyone used to conduct business. We had our own local dialect which was soft and colourful by comparison to the coarse shouts of the deck hands from the east. And then there were the men from the deserts of Arabia, who spoke together so quickly in a totally unintelligible guttural patois I sometimes wondered how they had learned such a difficult tongue. But when they spoke in Greek, which they had to do to make themselves understood, it was not especially good Greek; it was rather slow and strongly accented.
To me, my city seemed such a crossroads of goods in those days. You could see all the different cargoes being piled
THE JOURNEY
up on the quaysides, merchandise from all over the world. There were special ships from Syria that landed exotic silk from somewhere far to the east, beyond the edge of the earth someone once told me. It arrived in bales wrapped tightly in woollen sacks which from the outside looked distinctly uninteresting. But I had seen them carefully unwrapped in the special warehouses away from the dockside and they were absolutely magnificent. I remember seeing one merchant unrolling a bale and the vibrant colours of the fabric appeared to cascade all over the floor. The decorations on the individual bolts of cloth were fantastic, woven with beautiful mythical beasts in colours so bright they almost seemed alive. There were huge flowers and trees, all in greens, reds, whites and browns, all colours of the rainbow and so finely crafted you wondered, as they lay there glowing in the sunlight, if any human fingers could be nimble enough to produce such incredible pictures as they did.
The silk merchants were a rather aloof class and wealthy too. They would speak in reverential tones about the textures, the knot values and the prices, which seemed so out of this world they were like the very silk itself. I wondered who would wear such exotic fabrics, but it seemed there was an inexhaustible demand for this material among the endless rich matriarchs of the imperial capital, Rome and these appetites must be being passed on to their daughters too. I doubted I would ever see
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anyone dressed in such finery. Who would ever be able to afford such luxury where we lived?
There were other expensive cargoes. Every now and then a ship would be carrying spices from India – pepper, ginger and turmeric. They came in small wooden drums and when they had been offloaded they were lined up in rows on the flag-stones to be auctioned. Another cargo which fascinated yet frightened me a bit were the wild animals - the elephants, giraffes and other exotic beasts from Africa. They were sold to Rome to be killed in the arena for entertainment on public holidays, to celebrate the emperor’s birthday or some other festival; we Greeks would never indulge in such barbaric sport as killing animals for amusement.They looked so dejected, being forcibly dragged off the ships to be kept in pens outside the city. I didn’t much like the men who traded in these animals either. They always looked untrustworthy somehow and they were so cruel to their charges it’s a wonder any of the animals survived the journey. But being boys it didn’t stop us going out to the pens now and again to see if they had acquired anything we hadn’t seen before.
But mostly the shipments with which the men on the quaysides were busiest were commodities being exported from our valley - timber, animal hides and agricultural produce from the fields of the Xanthos Valley to be sold to Rome and the other big Italian cities. There were forests of tree trunks which were